Monthly Archives: October 2004

Do you live the way you want to live? Where are you? Are you living in the place you want to be living? Why not? Are you even living? How different are you from a leaf blowing — a slave being pushed along by currents of economy and politics, on a journey wholly out of your own control?

Recently a Delta pilot was forced to have his co-pilot do the landing as they came in to SLC en route from Dallas. Five miles away from the airport, they started to notice a laser beam bouncing around their cockpit. The beam struck one of the pilots in the eye, burning his retina and blinding him — this was no laser pointer, this was a higher power laser (more).

For under $2000 I could anyone with basic technical skills could build you a CO2 laser and a targetting system that could fire sustained bursts of blinding-level laser light accurately into the windows of a moving plane. I could Anyone could then start taking out planes and probably never be caught for it.

While the most likely explanation is a low-cost ground-based attack like the one I've just described, there are a lot of potential explanations. It might also be a stray (or guided) shot from a military satellite (more).

When pussy cutting is outlawed, only outlaws will cut pussy. It sounds crazy, doesn't it? We live in a world where parents are allowed to have religious practitioners amputate the most sensitive part of a male's anatomy at birth, without their consent of course, but the woman pictured on this shirt is in prison for her role in hood splitting and labial cutting on consenting adults.

Isn't freedom about being allowed to do whatever you want, as long as you're not hurting others? Maybe it was in the past, but not these days. These days, freedom means being who they tell you to be and doing what you're told. Show those that want to make you a slave that you support people's right to do whatever they want to with their bodies.

PROCEEDS FROM THE SALE OF THIS SHIRT GO TO SUPPORT THE TODD BERTRANG AND ROBYN FAULKINBURY DEFENSE. (Click here for more information on their case).

Click here for printable PDF petition form that you can print out and mail off to show your support. Sorry, US citizens only (for the petition, not the shirt).

I've just posted an experience update with about a hundred and fifty new stories (as a point of trivia, that brings us to 7,374 stories so far this year). Thanks to the writers and review team, and thanks as well for icklepurklegirl for being the cover model (BE pulling). New Lizardman Q&A tomorrow…

Let's see. I don't have much more to say, so I'll share an email I got. Here are “Natzst's” “best quality” pictures. This is the exact size and quality I got them at:

Now, of course those got turned down, since they're both too small and too blurry for me to be able to use on BME. Many of you have seen the automated note, but it explains how to take a higher resolution shot and reminds them to make sure they have their camera in macro mode and so on. This is the response I got; it's fairly typical.

your site is shit, thats the second pic turned down. i have a 4.0 mega pixel camera, the quality is amazing.

It always surprises me that people believe that buying a more expensive camera will automatically result in better pictures — if you don't know how to drive, it doesn't matter how nice a car you own!

Good coverage of the debate over at derelection2004, but I think that the post-debate interview with Karl Rove by the New York Post's Vince Morris:

Vince Morris: So, would you say this is the worst debate of President Bush's life?Karl Rove: No, but I would say it's one of John Kerry's worst.Vince Morris:Really? You can say that with a straight face?

Honestly, what a strange debate. Bush basically took all of his talking points — those expressions you've heard him use over and over — and just kept repeating them in apparently random order, rarely answering the question in anything but the vaguest sense. While I understand that lifelong Republicans have some kind of deluded concept “honor” or “patriotism” that makes them feel traitorous considering Kerry, at this point you'd really have to be pretty dimwitted to stick with Bush…

Come on — arguing that the Iraq war was the right thing to do because it disarmed Saddam, when the final outcome showed that there never were weapons in the first place is a truly glorious piece of double-think. How stupid does Bush think Americans are? Do people really buy it when Guilliani does damage control afterwards, saying, “Saddam was the WMD!”?

Cop: Mr. Larratt, why did you shoot that guy?Shannon: He had a gun and he was going to shoot me!Cop: Oh, well that's self-defense then.Shannon: I know!Cop: Wait... he doesn't have a gun.Shannon: I disarmed him.Cop: But you don't have his gun; just your own... ...and his isn't here anywhere.Shannon: Thank God I disarmed him, or it would be.Cop: There was no gun, was there?Shannon: He WAS a gun! I mean, look at him!Cop: You really aren't backing down on this, are you?Shannon: God Bless Shannon.

God I need an interrobang right now.

And I don't buy this “we can't say anything bad about the war, because it'll make the troops sad” lie either. Anyone here with military family or that even reads Army Times knows that the troops are aware that this was a mistake and that it's really screwed up. It's not some secret we can keep from them — they're there on the ground, and know better than anyone what a mistake it was. They also know that the reason that over a thousand Americans have been sent home in body bags and almost 20,000 have been sent home on stretchers, isn't because of “terrorists” or “foreign fighters” — it's because regular civilian Iraqis, now insurgents, don't want Americans there.

I ask those of you reading this: have you ever made a mistake?

When you make a mistake, do you learn from it, clean up the mess, and try not to repeat the mistake? Or do you put on your game face, and keep repeating the mistake over and over and over so know you appear stupid and self-destructive “consistent and strong”? If you recognize that America is moving in the wrong direction, is it best to “stay the course”, or is it best to “flip flop”?